Mapping Komiza Narratives

workshop in Komiža...

Our concept of researching the city Komiza trough new media begun with the title Women who rule Komiža. It sounds as a very promising topic and an utterly attractive one as well. And it was indeed. This topic led us to discover insides of Komiza and Komizan people aka: komizians. It is known that important jobs in this city are run by female directors. The mayor of the city is female as are the director of nautic center, director of school, director of elderly home, director of kindergarten, director of “komunala” system and a few more.

It seems that the roles in this city are changed. In the process of research we realized that this has a logical explanation. Because men are fisherman, they never had time to study, so the women stayed at home and study. As it happened, women in Komiža are the only one with the proper education for running these jobs. Ofcourse also the history of war probably has made some impact on this reason. During II. warld war the island of Vis was a military base. Men and women were solders in Partizan movement. After that the island also had truble with drug addictions as in one year around 27 young men died of overdose. Probably this didn’t just happen because the solitude in the winter, when there are just 800 people leaving on this island- knowing everything about each other, from addictions, to sexual life- everyone knows everything. The harsh experience of war, the solitude, and hard fishing business, made the city as it is today. Beautifully secretive. And when you slowly burst one layer, you fund another one, and after this another one leads you to new door, and after the door there is a window and then you find yourself in the ”Hole” with all the local men and their secrets that apparently don’t want to remain hidden. It takes time to get in, but when you do catch the right wind, it takes you to many different places full of unbelievable “non fiction” stories. So, after we encountered the first passage, we went with the flow, because it led us to another one, and another one and so on… People of this Island opened up to us, and we decided to expand our research. In the process we realized that the most important thing is the title of the workshop- mapping Komiza narratives - trough our encounters, stories or as we quickly realized - faciendas. That is how our project became an experimental “nun fiction” documentary facienda, of our own experience and impressions. In the video we introduced “map of our Komiza”, which consist of people we encountered and the stories they have to give. And in the end we realized that we have made an incredible intermedia art piece combining video, drawings, light installation, jamm session with local musicion, and the performative part of our project became telling our facienda to others. We nailed it! Right in the point of Mapping Komiza Narratives.